Grammy Winner Billy Preston; Wrote 'Nothing From Nothing'

Billy Preston, 59, a piano prodigy and Grammy Award winner who performed with the Beatles and wrote "Nothing From Nothing" and the Joe Cocker hit "You Are So Beautiful," died June 6 at Scottsdale Healthcare Shea in Arizona of complications from a kidney transplant. His health problems followed years of substance abuse.

Mr. Preston's rise in the music business was astounding: By 16, he had worked with Mahalia Jackson, Nat "King" Cole, Little Richard and Sam Cooke. He also had his first solo release, a gospel record called "Sixteen-Year-Old Soul."

He met the then-unknown Beatles in 1962, when the British rock band was the bottom half of a bill at the Star Club in Hamburg. At the time, Mr. Preston was accompanying Cooke and Little Richard on a European tour, and he developed a friendship with guitarist George Harrison.

In the late 1960s, Mr. Preston was a studio musician on the Beatles's "White Album" and "Abbey Road" releases and received label credit as a keyboardist on the "Let It Be" album. Harrison also co-produced two early Preston albums, "That's the Way God Planned It" and "Encouraging Words."

After the Beatles disbanded, Mr. Preston performed with John Lennon and Ringo Starr separately and was featured on Harrison's Grammy-winning "Concert for Bangladesh" release. Mr. Preston won his Grammy for best pop instrumental performance for "Outa Space" (1971), one of many synthesizer-heavy pieces that ushered in the disco age.

Among his notable songs were "I Wrote a Simple Song," "Space Race" and "Will it Go 'Round in Circles," the last featuring the verse, "I got a story, ain't got no moral/Let the bad guy win every once in a while."

Mr. Preston was deeply religious and a recovering drug addict. He said he was comfortable recording Lennon's song "God" but "did kind of flinch" when playing "Sympathy for the Devil" when he toured with the Rolling Stones.

"I couldn't justify that," he said of the Stones piece. "I just played along and didn't think about it."

The son of gospel musicians, William Everett Preston was born Sept. 9, 1946, in Houston and raised in Los Angeles. His parents divorced, and his mother, a church musician and funeral home secretary, encouraged her son's musical talent. He learned piano at 3 by following an older sister's hand movements on the keyboard.

He later accompanied gospel performers Jackson and the Rev. James Cleveland and was spotted during one concert by a movie producer looking to cast "St. Louis Blues," a 1958 film biography of ragtime jazz composer W.C. Handy. Mr. Preston was cast as the young Handy, who is later played by Cole.

Mr. Preston became a regular on the gospel circuit and in 1962 was booked for a European tour with Cooke and Little Richard.

"I had gotten hooked up with Little Richard because he was a minister, and I first heard him in church," Mr. Preston told the Boston Globe. "I was playing a lot of gospel music at the time. . . . When I went to Germany with Little Richard, in fact, we thought we were going to do gospel. But then we got over there and discovered it was a rock 'n' roll tour."